Mexican Milpa Is the Ancient Way of Farming and Eating That Ensures a Delicious Future

There’s an old joke you may have seen repeated on TikTok or in standup comedy about Mexican food being all the same. People (including Mexicans — in English and Spanish) are often pointing out how each dish uses a variation of the same ingredients, reconfigured to make something new. In a surprising plot twist, they’re not entirely wrong. Today’s Mexican food is a byproduct of an ancient diet and farming technique known as milpa.

“It’s a traditional Mesoamerican farming technique where the three sisters — maize, pumpkin, and beans — are grown together,” explains chef Alex Henry of El Molino in St. Louis. The restaurant, which he opened with his brother Jeff, draws from their family’s Mayan roots and specializes in cuisine from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. 

“It starts with maize which takes nitrogen from the soil. Beans replace nitrogen in the soil,” he says. “The pumpkin acts as ground cover, preventing the overgrowth of weeds. You might see the use of peppers, acting as natural pesticide. The technique has been around for millennia.” 

What is milpa? It depends who you ask

Think of milpa along the same lines of the Mediterranean diet. It encompasses specific foods; tomatoes, avocado, and jicama are additional examples. Where it diverges from the European food category is that milpa also is the result of a farming technique requiring certain produce — often corn, beans, and pumpkins or some other cucurbit — to grow alongside each other in a symbiotic ecosystem. But, Henry points out that milpa is more sustainable because it doesn’t require pesticides or fertilizers. The intertwining of these plants creates a byproduct that diners benefit from. 

“We live by the saying, ‘What grows together, goes together,’” says Henry. Every dish on his menu includes at least two kinds of produce that have been farmed this way. “Milpa ingredients always go great together and there’s a versatility to them so that they can be used in different ways.” He does admit there is one drawback. “It requires farming by hand because the machinery doesn’t exist to harvest a field that isn’t full of monocultures.”

Depending on who you ask, the definition of milpa extends beyond certain crops and farming to include the entire ecosystem it lives in. Alan Carias, executive chef at the Conrad Tulum Riviera Maya, believes milpa should be thought of in broader terms.

“Even for Mexicans it’s hard to understand what milpa is,” Carias says. “When we talk about milpa, we think it’s just maize — but milpa isn’t just what we grow. It also consists of meat, seafood, and fruit. It’s everything we eat, it’s the entire diet.”

Putting milpa on the menu

This past summer, Carias teamed up with chef Francisco Molina Vázquez, from Evoka restaurant in Tlaxcala to put that mindset to work on the plate. For two nights at Autor restaurant in Tulum, the duo created an eight-course meal to educate diners on the variety of milpa and it proved so popular that the menu has become a permanent fixture. Watermelon, dragonfruit, tomatoes, epazote, mushrooms, and maize were all in the mix for a dazzling display of Mexico’s biodiversity.

Carias attributes confusion around the Mesoamerican agriculture technique — even among Mexicans — to a lack of information and systemic preservation of the country’s native knowledge. He points to culinary schools in Mexico that focus their curriculum on French techniques and ingredients, while deprioritizing indigenous culture. This has resulted in less formal documentation and varying definitions of milpa.

It’s perhaps this hunger to know more and celebrate the country’s roots that’s led to a growing trend among young Mexican chefs to reject work abroad in favor of focusing on the ingredients found at their feet, and creating culinary gems that tell the story of their people.

Chefs Xrysw Díaz and Óscar Segundo are the couple behind Guadalajara, Jalisco’s Xokol — a restaurant dedicated to honoring maize and rooted in Segundo’s Mazahua identity. These chefs are redirecting their attention inward in order to educate consumers on the power and magic Mexican ingredients and techniques hold. Xokol stands as proof of their desire to honor their ancestral heritage through food.

The Pujol effect

You could call it the Pujol effect. When chef Enrique Olvera opened the groundbreaking restaurant nearly 25 years ago, framing Mexican cuisine as fine dining and becoming one of the best restaurants in the world, it inspired Mexican diners and chefs to take a closer look at the produce and practices they had once undervalued. (Olvera is a fan of Díaz and Segundo’s work.)

“Look at the chinampas, they’re very complex,” Carias says, referring to the floating gardens in the Mexico City borough of Xochimilco. There, canals have become a tourist attraction and its ancient Aztec farming techniques have largely been forgotten, leaving the city’s ecosystem at risk.

“We go to Xochimilco with mariachi and tequila but we don’t realize how important Xochimilco is for Mexico and unfortunately we haven’t taken care of it as well as we should.”

This commitment to honoring the past and ensuring it doesn’t disappear is inspiring a new generation of chefs to educate others about the rich history and roots of Mexican cuisine. So yes, in a way, Mexican food is all the same. Maize, beans, and pumpkin are grown within a sophisticated ecosystem where their connection to one another allows for endless variations, made from the same core ingredients. If you’ve eaten Mexican food, you’ve had a taste of milpa and alongside of it, thousands of years of history. 

Elizabeth Quan Kiu V. contributed to the story.